Donna Conlon

Initially trained as a biologist, Donna Conlon began her artistic career as a sculptor, eventually expanding her practice to include video, installation, photography, and performance art. She exhibits internationally; solo exhibitions include Trash Trees, Nuevo ESPACIO/ARTE Contemporáneo, Panama City, 2004; Más me dan, Jacob Karpio Galería, San José, 2006 and Coexistence, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel, 2006. Her work has also been shown in Ecuador, Spain, Australia, Switzerland, and Norway, among other countries.

In 2008, she participated for the second time in the Panamanian Biennial of Art. In 2007, she received a grant for emerging Latin American artists from the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), and was featured in New Zealand's premier international contemporary art exhibition, the Auckland Triennial; she also participated in Inter-Faces, the first exhibition of international contemporary video art to take place in Kazakhstan. She participated in the 51st Venice Bienniale (Italy) in 2005, as well as in the exhibition of the Italo-Latin American Institute, Warp and Weft. Conlon received First Prize at the IV Biennial of Visual Arts of the Central American Isthmus in 2004, and in 2003 was awarded the Residency Prize at the Caribbean Biennial (Dominical Republic) and the Second Prize in the first Central American Emerging Artists Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Costa Rica.

Conlon describes her work as "socio-archaeological inquiry into my immediate surroundings. I collect and accumulate ordinary objects, images, and repeated actions from my daily life and local environment, and then use them to reveal the idiosyncrasies of human nature and the contradictions inherent to our contemporary lifestyle."